Collaboration, along with innovation, has become a mainstay in any game of buzzword bingo. And when playing with a group of social entrepreneurs, your scorecard is likely to fill up fast.

Collaboration is so easy to say and yet so difficult to do that the term risks becoming hollow. Meaningful collaboration – where both parties go away changed from the encounter, with new insights that they take back to their work, their organisation, and their sector – requires an openness that can be challenging if it involves sharing ideas that may be seen as proprietary or exposing areas of weakness where help may be needed.

Nominet Trust's speedmatching event last week, facilitated by the Media Trust, brought together 60 social entrepreneurs, funders, commercial providers, academics and policy makers to explore the potential for collaboration around technology for social change. It was encouraging to see genuine openness and interest in finding areas of common ground to identify opportunities for joint working.

This is good news as Nominet Trust hasn't always got collaboration right. We have tried to force it at times, bringing together initiatives that we thought would benefit from working together and which could become greater than the sum of their parts through partnership. In practice, forced collaborations rarely work as the appetite for partnership is usually lacking and this results in limited, constrained conversations.

Last week was very different, with some big conversations taking place. The Hub Westminster was awash with ambition and a sense of purpose. Einstein's definition of insanity was making the same mistakes over and over again. By this measure, the group gathered last week were wise indeed as they determined to learn from each other's mistakes – and successes – so that they could increase the impact of their work.

Some conversations went beyond the exchange of experiences and, to add to my scorecard, ventured into the open innovation space. 'Open innovation' involves taking insights and approaches that are external to an organisation and building on them to develop new concepts and approaches. Importantly, open innovation involves working with partners through sharing the risks and rewards of innovation.

There are multiple examples in the commercial sector such as Kraft Food Collaboration Kitchen, but this approach is quite new and untested by charities and social enterprises.

It's too early to say, but the signs are that some of those gathered last week will seek to work together across sectors to co-develop solutions to specific social challenges. That really would constitute meaningful collaboration and is just what we need if we are to find imaginative ways of addressing the persistent and long-standing problems that our society faces.